


A Balada in Bariloche

by astramaxima (shotgunsinlace)



Series: Homeland [2]
Category: Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
Genre: Angst, Badass Agent Stone (Sonic the Hedgehog 2020), Blood and Violence, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Procedures, Near Death Experiences, Pre-Slash, Tenderness, Whump, but very mild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:21:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26187112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shotgunsinlace/pseuds/astramaxima
Summary: The highest priority task, as stated in theBlack Bookevery agent holds sacred, is to protect The Asset at all costs.
Relationships: Dr. Eggman | Dr. Robotnik & Agent Stone, Dr. Eggman | Dr. Robotnik/Agent Stone
Series: Homeland [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1881388
Comments: 14
Kudos: 59





	1. Adrift In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hereticality](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hereticality/gifts).



> MONTHS ago I told a certain someone "Hey, I feel like writing some Stone whump but I'm not sure HOW TO APPROACH THAT", so some time later that someone went: ["How's this for a prompt?"](https://twitter.com/hrgwin/status/1275907130202169349) And that's the story of how this fic (and probs this whole series, to be honest) was born. The loveliest shout-out to Himi (I swear this week has been the 'let's just dedicate all my writing to the Himi week')!

    Objective: CLASSIFIED
  
    Location: 34.6037° S, 58.3816° W
  
    Time: 2200

The patter of rain against aluminum and galvanized steel omits his footsteps against the polished concrete floor of the sparsely lit hangar. Only a few industrial-grade lamps powered by gas generators cast shadows across ultra-long-range jets and biz liners from overhead, buffeted by hurricane-strength winds.

A total of nine armed militia stand between Stone and his target: the captured Eggpod that would ensure their hasty escape from the envoy of pissed off Argentinian government officials hot on their trail.

The routine reconnaissance mission should have been cut and dry: Dr. Robotnik does his thing to attempt and acquire offshore assets on behalf of the American military while Stone scouts for sleazy backdoor exchanges that would damage the ‘diplomatic’ aspect of their blatantly technologically superior bribery. There are no good guys in the business of war machines, but at least Robotnik has integrity.

It takes Stone three seconds to install the suppressor on his S&W Victory, and four to slip from behind a creaking steel pillar and seek low cover behind a stack of plastic wrapped crates.

He pings the location of all nine individuals and keeps to the shadows, constantly moving, acutely aware of the ticking clock in the back of his head. The Eggpod can handle gunfire and small artillery, but the window to power it on, get them both inside, and fly out of the hanger before the envoy arrives is too narrow to risk it. 

Robotnik’s safety is his top priority and the odds are not in his favor, but he must move.

Back flush against the crates, he takes aim at the soldier stationed at the highest vantage point in the hangar. Stone doesn’t have the appropriate tools to snipe his way downward but taking out the eagle eye will blind the counter operation long enough for him to sweep the open floor.

Outside the hangar, someone whistles.

Stone feels his forearm muscles tense as he tightens his grip on the gun, stepping out into the open when a scuffle breaks out outside of his line of sight. He hears the tell-tale hum of the Eggpod powering on, the slow pump of anxiety shutting down for an internal override. Years-worth of training kicks in, and Stone fires a warning shot to draw everyone’s attention.

It partly works when seven out of the nine turn to him, rifles poised on their shoulders and index fingers on the trigger. The other two, much to Stone’s distress, haul Robotnik into the hanger, but the doctor doesn’t come easily.

A woman dressed in blue and grey fatigues holds up her first. “Hold your fire. Necesitamos el doctor consciente, al menos que alguien quiera explicarle a Rosario el por qué le falta una pierna,” she says loud enough for all to hear above the storm’s wails. “Aunque no creo que la necesite.”

“¿Y el agente?” shouts someone else from overhead.

The woman fixes her gaze on Stone. “Do what you want with him.” She lets her rifle swing down to her hip, unbothered. “¿Es guapo, no? Tremenda lástima.”

Stone widens his stance, his gun now trained on the woman.

Behind her, Robotnik wrestles himself free with an indignant huff, brushing off his coat. “Unless you want dear ol’ Uncle Sam snatching those bananas again, I recommend unclenching your _cojones_ for a hot second.”

“You talk big for being surrounded, gringo. I doubt your bodyguard is as good as you hope he is.” 

Robotnik strolls over to her, standing toe to toe to use his height to intimidate, but the woman doesn’t budge. 

She smiles up at him with a row of pearly whites. “Turn off the machine,” she says. Grabbing a ready hold of the rifle again she props it against her hip, casually aiming it at Stone, “or his kneecaps will only be the first things I bust.”

Stone keeps his eyes trained on her, redesigning his escape plan.

They want Robotnik alive, that much he has been able to deduce, but he’s dealt with enough paramilitary groups to know that the term is as relative as it can possibly be. Stone knows what it is to be taken alive, and the scars beyond the physical ones still linger.

With the Eggpod ready to launch, he can viably cover Robotnik until he is safely inside it. There is always the risk of a graze, but Stone calculates a good 90% chance of the doctor’s survival.

“The lack of creativity is exhausting. Don’t you agree, Stone?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“I can barely keep my eyes open,” he says, faking a yawn before pressing the hand to his back for a stretch. Stone catches him pressing a sequence on his gloves and he instantly readies himself for the chaos that is about to ensue. “Anyhoo, pleasure working with y’all— _Not_.”

The deafening clang of bending metal and sharp shattering of glass launch Stone into action.

Rapid gunfire goes off around them, aiming at the swarm of drones that drift down with the precision of bees looking to protect their queen. Stone runs across the hangar and grabs Robotnik by the coat sleeve, yanking him in a silent command to stay at his back at all times amidst the crossfire. One look is all it takes to convey the plan: get to the Eggpod and fly. Political messes can be straightened out once the doctor is safe.

Stone lays down cover fire as he backtracks his way towards the center of the floor where salvation awaits, occasionally glancing at Robotnik who moves with surprising composure, tapping away at his wrist device with annoyed huffs. He would have laughed if not for the sudden tap on his left bicep, not unlike being hit by a small pebble spat out from underneath a tire.

Stone ignores it and reloads, aiming non-lethal shots at the people above, buying them time. But another hit, this time larger, just above his right hip, makes him falter with a barely audible “oh”.

He shoves Robotnik in the direction of the aircraft when his legs suddenly struggle to keep him upright.

Two tours and eighty-two field missions without a blip on the radar, he figures having his streak broken by the one that does him in is the best way to go. At the very least he did his job to the best of his ability and then some. With the badniks coming in hot and Robotnik less than fifteen feet away from the Eggpod, Stone can take the fall with graceful acceptance.

And he does, when a third bullet clips him just below the rib cage.

Hitting the floor hurts more than the wounds themselves, the side of his head soundlessly smacking into the concrete. He rolls onto his back with a sharp gasp, the burning that blooms along every synapse in his torso freezing him in place, begging him not to move, to push out the burn that makes the edges of his vision blur black.

Regardless, he scrambles at his chest, presses a palm over the entry wound below his ribs in hopes to staunch the bleeding, but it only takes him so long to realize he can’t move his arms at all. The hands on him aren’t his own, which also explains why he’s being jostled about when all he wants to do is lay there and pray the spool unravels as quickly as possible as to put an end to the waves of nausea and painfully racing heartbeat.

Stone hears his name somewhere past an invisible threshold and he fights against it, recognizes the voice purely as Robotnik’s and it’s closer now, by his ear, and he’s still being jostled, dragged. Stone tries to fight him off in those long moments that realistically can only be seconds, tries to tell him _go, leave, now’s your chance_. But all he can do is lay there, useless.

At the very end of it all, Stone allows himself one final selfish thought: at least he isn’t alone.

When he had been pulled from active duty to serve as head of Dr. Robotnik’s security detail, his commanding officer had pat him on the back, said something along the lines of _‘congratulations, looks like you’ll get to ride the pale horse on foreign soil after all, Lieutenant.’_

Little had he known that he’d ease into the deep sleep reclined on his beloved homeland.


	2. Your Sea

Home is a funny concept, Robotnik thinks to himself while washing his hands for the third time in an hour. He makes sure to get underneath his nails for those microscopic particles he knows were obliterated during the first dip in near-boiling water, but one can’t be too certain. Wouldn’t do to let things fester in hard to reach places. Instead, he scrubs and scrubs, and then scrubs some more. Pats his hands dry. Works some lotion into too-dry skin. Slips his usual command gloves back on.

Nothing to do now but wait.

He isn’t home; therefore, he has no hardware on hand to fiddle with. They should have wrapped up their little visit abroad in record time: wrapped it, slapped a bow on it, shipped it First Class to Homeland Security with a little box of rum-infused truffles and a little pink card that read ‘For Janet’ attached. All they wrapped—all _he_ wrapped—was Stone’s entire midsection in state-of-the-art molecular stitching gauze. Purely experimental. Never been tested.

Five hours ago, he was forced to decide, and he made the call, took the plunge, rolled the dice. That 100% success rate is often saved for fully polished field runs after extensive testing that are kept off official books—conveniently erased first-runs that end in explosive chaos and singed eyebrows. There’s a reason the government doesn’t care for his process, only the finished product.

Six hours ago, Agent Stone slipped into hypovolemic shock due to multiple bullet wounds. Robotnik was able to keep him alive using the Eggpod’s auxiliary life support system but transferring him from the ship to the makeshift lab they have been using for the past week proved more harrowing than Robotnik had hoped.

Five hours and forty-five minutes ago, Stone flatlined. 

It took Robotnik one minute to steady his hands, and another to inject one milligram of epinephrine straight into the agent’s heart while administering oxygen and chest compression at steady intervals. Two minutes before the second dose, and he cursed out every member with a seat in the G6. Had they been home, had he been in his actual lab, this would have been easier, cleaner, failproof.

Five and a half hours ago, Stone gasped and his vitals spiked. Robotnik hooked him up, stabilized him, and got to work.

Tools on hand were limited and what little he did have with him he ripped from the pod’s memory bank, repurposed what was available to work in his favor and—et voila! One stabilized agent under anesthesia and a steady drip of painkillers to keep him loopy for days. A very _alive_ agent. A breathing one. One that will likely be out of commission for a couple of weeks, but it’s not like he did anything to his vocal cords. Stone would still be able to talk to him, praise Robotnik for his genius work, stare on with that earnest wonder he’s only ever seen reflected in the mirror while daydreaming about his machines while styling his mustache.

Victorious, Robotnik took a step back from the makeshift operating table. He intended to snap off the sterile gloves and clean up the area, but instead his knees chose that moment to betray him, sending him to the unfeeling floor.

“You always have to go and make everything about _you_ ,” Robotnik said, shifting into a sitting position and slouching over his lap with an exhausted sigh. A lie, of course, but he had to make himself feel better somehow. “Did you ever stop to think, even for a second, that playing hero might get you killed and by extension leave me _vulnerable_?” He paused, scoffed. “Bold of me assume you use that brain of yours for something other than coffee and—” He stopped again, bloody glove over his chest as he tried to comprehend and consequently suppress the violent explosion in his chest that ripped out of him in the form of a sob. “Stone, you—you goddamn _blockhead_.”

Four hours ago, Robotnik fell asleep on that concrete floor, propped up against the side of the operating table.

Two hours ago, he stitched up a small graze on his calf and cleaned up the area with still-shaky hands. He scrubbed his hands, sniffled some more, then gathered his wits.

Since then, he has been monitoring the perimeters on the holographic console like an amped-up hawk, sweat gathering under the collar of his coat as he redirects his focus to how to get them home without further incident. _La milicia_ have given up on their pursuit for now, and those double-crossing bastards of the shadow government are likely rejoicing thinking they’ve gotten their pound of flesh.

_They hit him where it hurt: took his machines, killed his bodyguard, wounded him. But, lo! It takes so much more than some half-baked plan to throw Robotnik off his game._

“Transhumanism!” he says, whipping around and stalking towards the cot Stone lays on, as good as dead to the world. “Can’t die if your body’s indestructible now, can you. And in the off chance someone was to break you, your entire consciousness would be backed up and deposited into a new, stronger, sleeker model. Like a sports car but deadlier.” Robotnik snaps his fingers to announce his own brilliance, sitting on the edge of the cot and winking down at Stone’s prone form. “I can do it, Stone. Give me a week and I’ll crack it.”

Of course he can crack it, just how he cracked the Antimatter Theorem in six hours while high on caffeine and other questionably irradiated substances. Nothing quite like the right motivation—money doesn’t inspire anymore, never really has, but at the very least it’s funded his tightly monitored and government sanctioned passions—and boy is he motivated. Not by Stone. Stone is merely the catalyst to his imagination. Less a motivation and more an inspiration.

Robotnik could give him the ultimate robotic body, a masterpiece of innovation and cutting-edge technology. His whole arm could be one big gun, hooked up to an ionic cell to offer unlimited power and ammunition. _A laser gun_.

It would still be Stone despite the lack of everything else that physically identifies him as Stone. Robotnik can live without the soft, warm, and blatantly inferior human form. He doesn’t need those hands to help him up whenever he’s knocked off his feet for whatever reason, or that face that lights up into a familiar—not to mention _dumb_ —smile whenever Robotnik unveils his latest creation.

He likely won’t smell the same, either. No trace of freshly brewed coffee, a faint hint of cologne, or that earthier scent that is less inorganic and can only belong to Stone.

It would still be Stone—and Robotnik is uncertain as to why he hates the idea so much.

Looking down at him, at his expressionless face, Robotnik would like his brain to just stop running at 100RPM for a sliver of a second.

Stone is alive. He’s breathing. A little feverish, but nothing a good dose of antibiotics can’t take care of once they return to base. Stone is alive and Robotnik isn’t alone, not like he once was, before this insufferably competent government agent he plucked out of death row waltzed into his lab with a beaming grin and a will to kick Robotnik into becoming some semblance of a human being.

In the quiet of their hideout, Robotnik reaches to wipe away the perspiration on Stone’s forehead with a thumb. He then takes a moment to sweep back his short hair, making it stick up and taking off a good ten years off his face.

“There’s only so much time I can spend debating with myself before I get bored,” he says, fixing the military-issued blanket and tucking it neatly along Stone’s arms. “We could have made it had you given up cover fire. I ran the logistics.” Something tells him Stone did too, but his sense of duty hadn’t wanted to risk it. “The verdict: for being my assistant, my old schoolboy braces had better common sense than you.”

“You have two days,” Robotnik says, crossing his legs and looking off in the direction of their duffel bags. “We’re heading home whether you’re awake or not.” He sniffs, scowling at nothing. “And yes, that’s a threat.”

A brush against his thigh startles him and he almost slaps it away were it not for the glimpse of watery, unfocused eyes on him. Stone smiles and it’s a shaky little thing, more an involuntary twitch of his cheek than a conscious notion, but it’s enough. It punches the air out of Robotnik’s lungs and it’s _enough_ because he’s going to make it.

Agent Stone is alive, still smiling, and Robotnik won’t need to make him into knock-off _Iron Man._ Instead, they both get to live to die another day, and that’s more than Robotnik can possibly ask for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First time writing Robotnik's POV? You heckin' right it is.
> 
> There is ONE more part to this series so keep your eyes peeled!


End file.
